Girls Win the School, Lose the University: The One Gap Bangladesh Did Not Close

Executive Summary. Bangladesh built the most female-tilted secondary school system in its comparison group and then did not carry that cohort upward. Secondary gender parity was 1.14 girls enrolled per boy in 2019, the highest of the four countries reporting, against a peer median of 1.00. Tertiary parity was 0.77 in 2024, the lowest of the five countries reporting, against a peer median of 1.11. Thailand (1.25), Vietnam (1.16), India (1.05) and Pakistan (1.03) all sit above parity; Bangladesh is the only one of the five below it. Among the three peers that report both indicators, every single one reads higher at tertiary level than at secondary. Bangladesh reads 0.37 ratio points lower. The reflex explanation, a small university sector rationing scarce places, fails inside the group: Pakistan enrols 10.86% of its tertiary-age population against Bangladesh's 23.73%, less than half, and still reads above parity. Two Bangladeshi figures sit at the same ages as the loss: adolescent fertility of 70.81 births per thousand young women, the highest of the six and 2.76 times the peer median, and female labour force participation of 38.65%, against a peer median of 53.72%.

Two readings of the same system

Bangladesh's secondary gender parity index was 1.14 in 2019: relative to their respective age populations, 1.14 girls were enrolled in secondary school for each boy. That is the highest of the four countries reporting that year. India read 1.02, Thailand 1.00, Pakistan 0.87. The peer median was 1.00, so Bangladesh sits 0.15 ratio points above it.

The Bangladeshi series alone is the more arresting number. Secondary parity was 0.51 in 1990, roughly one girl enrolled for every two boys. By 2021 it was 1.24, a rise of 144.9%, or 2.45 times, inside a single generation. Very few social indicators in any country move that far that fast.

Source: World Bank World Development Indicators, school enrollment, secondary (gross), gender parity index, SE.ENR.SECO.FM.ZS, 2019.

Entry is not the constraint either. The primary parity index was 1.018 in 2021, second of the four countries reporting, behind Vietnam's 1.019 by a rounding error and above the peer median of 1.016. Bangladeshi girls arrive at school and stay through secondary at rates that most of the comparison group does not match.

Then the direction reverses. In 2024 Bangladesh's tertiary gender parity index was 0.77, the lowest of the five countries reporting. Thailand read 1.25, Vietnam 1.16, India 1.05, Pakistan 1.03. The peer median was 1.11, which puts Bangladesh at 0.70 of the peer median and makes it the only one of the five sitting below parity.

Source: World Bank WDI, school enrollment, tertiary (gross), gender parity index, SE.ENR.TERT.FM.ZS, 2024.

The distance between the two readings is 0.37 ratio points. Three caveats belong here before the interpretation, not after it. The readings are five years apart, because peer coverage for secondary parity in this comparison stops at 2019 while tertiary runs to 2024. They have different denominators, the secondary-age and tertiary-age populations. And they are not one cohort followed through a door; they are two photographs of one education system taken at two heights. What makes the pairing hold anyway is the comparison group: for each of the three peers reporting both indicators, the tertiary index is the higher of the two. India moves from 1.02 to 1.05, Pakistan from 0.87 to 1.03, Thailand from 1.00 to 1.25. Only Bangladesh moves the other way.

The small-sector explanation fails on its own terms

The obvious reading is that Bangladesh's tertiary sector is small, small sectors ration places, and the rationing falls on women.

The first half is true. Gross tertiary enrolment was 23.73% of the relevant age group in 2024, fourth of the five countries reporting and only 0.66 of the peer median of 36.01%. Thailand enrols 44.98%, Vietnam 37.59%, India 34.42%. Bangladesh runs a demonstrably thin university system for a country of 173.6 million people.

The second half does not survive the comparison. Pakistan's tertiary sector is smaller still, 10.86%, the smallest of the five reporting and less than half the Bangladeshi rate, and Pakistan's tertiary parity index is 1.03. A university system can be under half the size of Bangladesh's and still enrol women at a ratio above men. Scarcity of places is not the sorting mechanism, or Pakistan would sort harder.

That leaves the question of what does the sorting, and the honest answer is that six countries of WDI aggregates cannot identify it. What the data can do is say where in the life course the loss sits, and rule out at least one popular explanation.

Where the cohort is at eighteen

Two Bangladeshi figures are measured over precisely the years in which the tertiary gap opens.

The first is adolescent fertility: 70.81 births per thousand women in their late teens in 2024, the highest of the six countries and 2.76 times the peer median of 25.65, a gap of 45.17 births per thousand. India reads 13.04, Thailand 25.05, Indonesia 25.65, Vietnam 33.95, Pakistan 39.86. Bangladesh is not marginally above this group. It is nearly twice the next-highest country.

Coincident timing is not a mechanism, and the direction is not identified. A young woman who has already left education is more likely to marry and bear a child early; a young woman who marries early is less likely to continue. WDI separates neither, and the same underlying factor, household income or rural location, plausibly drives both. What the figure does establish is that the years between the secondary certificate and a first university term are, for Bangladeshi women, unusually crowded with a competing life event by regional standards.

The second is female labour force participation: 38.65% of Bangladeshi women aged fifteen and over were in the labour force in 2025, fourth of the six countries, 15.07 points below the peer median of 53.72% and 0.72 of it. Vietnam reads 68.55%, Thailand 58.96%, Indonesia 53.72%; Bangladesh sits above India (32.42%) and Pakistan (24.05%). The trend is real and upward, from 24.21% in 1990 to 38.65% in 2025, a gain of 14.44 points or 59.66%.

A degree is an investment whose return is collected in the labour market. Where the share of adult women in the labour force is 0.72 of the regional norm, the expected return on a female tertiary place is lower than on a male one, and households allocating scarce cash respond to expected returns. This is a hypothesis, and this data cannot test it. At least three rival explanations fit the same pattern equally well: the distance to institutions and the shortage of residential places for women, the cash cost of admission and living away from home, and the timing of marriage. Ranking them requires household survey data, not a cross-country panel.

Three decades, two speeds

Source: World Bank WDI, school enrollment, tertiary (gross), gender parity index, SE.ENR.TERT.FM.ZS, Bangladesh against comparators, from 1995.

Bangladesh's tertiary parity index rose from 0.48 in 2000 to 0.77 in 2024, a gain of 0.29 ratio points, or 61.31%. That is real movement, not stagnation, and it deserves saying because the headline invites the opposite impression.

It is also slow beside the school result. Secondary parity multiplied by 2.45 times between 1990 and 2021; tertiary parity multiplied by 1.61 times between 2000 and 2024. The windows differ in length and start date, so this is a rough comparison rather than a matched one. But over roughly comparable stretches, the country that erased its school gender gap has not closed the university one, while four of its comparators crossed into female-majority higher education.

The adult stock behind these flows is still thin. Adult literacy was 79% in 2022, third of the four countries reporting, 12.1 points below the peer median of 91.1% and ahead only of India at 76.32%. Vietnam reads 96.13%. Bangladesh's female schooling gain is genuinely recent, which is exactly why it has not yet become an adult population, and exactly why the tertiary bottleneck matters now rather than later.

What the numbers cannot say

Four limits, stated here rather than left for a critic.

Gross enrolment ratios count everyone enrolled against the official age population, so they include over-age and repeating students. A secondary parity index above 1 is partly a statement about boys, who may leave school early for paid work, and is not proof that more girls than boys sit in classrooms.

The comparison group is not constant. Six countries report adolescent fertility and female labour force participation. Five report tertiary parity and tertiary enrolment. Four report secondary parity, primary parity and adult literacy. Every superlative in this essay is stated against the countries that actually report, not against "the region".

The years differ. Secondary parity is 2019, primary parity 2021, adult literacy 2022, tertiary parity and tertiary enrolment and adolescent fertility 2024, labour force participation 2025. Each is the latest year with comparable coverage, not a common date, and readings taken five years apart cannot be treated as simultaneous.

Five or six countries is not a sample. These are associations across a handful of economies with different school structures, migration patterns and statistical systems. Nothing here identifies a cause. The finding that survives regardless is positional: among the peers that report, Bangladesh alone sits below tertiary parity, and alone reads lower at university than at school.

What would change this conclusion

A checkable test, in two directions. If Bangladesh's tertiary parity index reaches 0.9 by 2032 while gross tertiary enrolment stays near its 2024 level of 23.73%, then the deficit was a lag rather than a barrier and this essay has over-read it. If gross tertiary enrolment instead climbs past the peer median of 36.01% while the parity index stays below 0.8, then expansion is reaching men first, and the constraint sits specifically on the female side of the transition.

Three moves.

1. Measure the transition, not the enrolment. The published statistics count who is enrolled. The missing one is the share of higher-secondary completers, by sex, who enter a tertiary institution within a year. Without it, nobody can say whether the loss happens at the admission gate or in the months before it. Owner: BANBEIS with the University Grants Commission. Success signal: an annual sex-disaggregated transition rate, first reading published within two years.
2. Fund the transition year, not the degree. Whatever combination of support and expectation carried the female cohort to a secondary parity index of 1.14 does not carry the same cohort past it. The cheapest place to act is the interval between the higher-secondary result and the first tertiary term, when the binding costs are admission fees, travel, and somewhere safe to live. Owner: Ministry of Education with the University Grants Commission. Success signal: tertiary parity above 0.9 in a subsequent WDI release, from 0.77 in 2024.
3. Report late-teen childbearing as an education statistic. At 70.81 births per thousand, Bangladesh is the highest of the six and 2.76 times the peer median, on an indicator measured over exactly the years of the tertiary transition. It is currently read as a health number and filed away from education policy. Owner: Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics, publishing it beside secondary completion and tertiary entry. Success signal: an adolescent fertility rate below Pakistan's 39.86, which would still leave Bangladesh above the peer median of 25.65 but would end its position at the top of the group.

The counterargument

The strongest objection is a headcount argument. Bangladesh enrols 23.73% of the tertiary-age group, so a parity shortfall at that level touches a minority, while the secondary system, which touches nearly everyone, reads above parity in a way that two of the three peers reporting in 2019 do not. Counted in lives, Bangladesh's education gender record is the best story in the group, and this essay has found the one place where a success ends and called it a failure.

Three answers.

The composition of the tertiary cohort matters out of proportion to its size, because that cohort supplies the professions, the teaching workforce, the civil service and the managers of firms. A parity index of 0.77 at that level is a statement about who holds those roles in fifteen years, not about a statistical minority today.

The size defence is refuted inside the comparison group. Pakistan runs a tertiary sector under half the size of Bangladesh's, 10.86% against 23.73%, with a parity index above 1. Small sectors do not have to be male.

And the objection treats the secondary result as banked. Adult literacy of 79% in 2022, third of the four countries reporting, shows how much of the female schooling gain is still in the pipeline rather than in the adult population. The gain is young, and the university is the point where it is currently being spent down rather than compounded.

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Data sources: World Bank World Development Indicators, retrieved from the BDPolicyLab data lake, 2026-08-10. Comparators are India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam; "peer median" is the median of the comparators reporting in the stated year, excluding Bangladesh. Reporting coverage varies by indicator: secondary parity, primary parity and adult literacy rest on Bangladesh plus three reporting peers; tertiary parity and tertiary enrolment on Bangladesh plus four; adolescent fertility and female labour force participation on all six. Years used are the latest with comparable coverage in each series, so figures are not all drawn from a common date.

Sources

1. World Bank WDI, School enrollment, secondary (gross), gender parity index (GPI), SE.ENR.SECO.FM.ZS: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.ENR.SECO.FM.ZS
2. World Bank WDI, School enrollment, tertiary (gross), gender parity index (GPI), SE.ENR.TERT.FM.ZS: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.ENR.TERT.FM.ZS
3. World Bank WDI, School enrollment, primary (gross), gender parity index (GPI), SE.ENR.PRIM.FM.ZS: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.ENR.PRIM.FM.ZS
4. World Bank WDI, School enrollment, tertiary (% gross), SE.TER.ENRR: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.TER.ENRR
5. World Bank WDI, Labor force participation rate, female (% of female ages 15 and older), SL.TLF.CACT.FE.ZS: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.FE.ZS
6. World Bank WDI, Adolescent fertility rate (births per 1,000 women ages 15-19), SP.ADO.TFRT: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.ADO.TFRT
7. World Bank WDI, Literacy rate, adult total (% of people ages 15 and above), SE.ADT.LITR.ZS: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.ADT.LITR.ZS